Elizabeth Macklin
Sign Language Where the great hands spell out the A to Z and a scatter clearly means scatter, a pinkie held to the heart then an eye means I see, the grammar of which doesn't matter: a non- restrictive relation's conveyed by a gesture; the face is the only true place for expressions of love, indecision, rapture; two hands brushing the air past the ears mean "You lost me," were over my head, while love still appears on the heart (two crossed hands), not in the head, and practice is one hand a plane planing the back of the other— We do so nearly believe we'll have said what we needed to say, with our long training. ©2000, from You've Just Been Told. Reprinted with permission of W. W. Norton & Company. Master Classes |
Written workYou've Just Been Told.
"Elizabeth Macklin ... contemplates the grammars of loss in her second collection of poems. Here an only child's responses to the faits accomplis of childhood—decisions already made, accidents of history and family, patterns preset—come to the adult mind in the presence of change and grief." A Woman Kneeling in the Big City
"These are poems with ... a dark wit which yokes together diesel exhaust and desperate regret, and downright cityscapes with poignant longing. No dissociation of sensibility here."—Eavan Boland. "Who Put the Code in the Dagoeneko?" (2001)
In Barrow Street's Fall 2001 Translation Issue, Macklin explores the Basque language, and the realm of "pre-translation"—where "it's hard to explain a misunderstanding when you don't understand, and especially when you don't know you don't understand." "It's a Woman's Prerogative to Change Her Mind" (2000)
"Perhaps a reader of By Herself will 'swerve' or 'veer' from thought to thought pleasurably, as ... Macklin recommends that women poets do, as writers, in her...opening essay..."—Molly McQuade, in her Introduction to By Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry. |
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